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Kinda like having a 100000 mile warranty, and your cars engine dies at 103000 miles.

Exactly what I was thinking. My parents had a lightbulb in their garage that was there when they bought the house and never burned out in the subsequent 40 years and still hasn't burned out. Yet every incandescent bulb I've ever bought was only good for a couple hundred hours.

I hope his jury remembers what the corporations have been doing to them for decades and decades.

It depends on the garage: My garage lamps, if I had a garage currently, would be used quite a bit since I would be spending a fair bit of time out there. Other folks, not so much: The garage might just be where they park their cars, and/or have some infrequently-accessed storage. Either way, "garage" by itself doesn't indicate much about the usage of the bulb, but only that the space it is installed in was at one point intended to park a car in.

Your anecdotes are interesting, but don't really doesn't seem to have anything to do with the fact that the lower the voltage feeding a given bulb, the lower the temperature of the filament will be. And the lower the temperature of the filament, the slower the tungsten evaporates. And the slower the tungsten evaporates, the longer the bulb lasts.

That's a remarkable claim. So if you put 2 volts across a 130V lamp it'll no longer work after that?

P=VI. If you attempt to flow the proper wattage through the lamp at 2 volts you're going to burn out the filament. And if it didn't burn out, you'd burn out your wiring. As the lamp approaches its optimum voltage it puts out pure lumens per watt. Undervolting the lamp decreases the number of photons it will produce over its lifetime AND the number of photons expended per watt-hour of energy consumed.

Well maybe the "understanding" I gained from the last explanation I got was all retarded, but the current flow (I do know that it's current that flows, pushed by the potential of voltage through the resistance of the conductor... not sure the proper terminology for wattage occurring) is controlled by the resistance of the filament which rises with temperature.

Perhaps some forward-thinking bloke, back in the day 40 years ago, installed a 130V lamp instead of a 120V, which is a common "trick" for

...decreasing the lifetime of the lamp. Undervolting harms the lifespan AND puts out less light. You never want to undervolt your light source.

Don't be silly. A 130-volt bulb has a higher resistance (for the same wattage rating) than a 120-volt bulb therefore at 120 volts pulls less current. It puts out less light, and runs at a lower temperature. And lasts longer. That's what most 'long life' bulbs are. The effect on lifetime is governed by the 12th power of the ratio of voltages, i.e. a 1500hr 130-volt bulb would last almost twice as long at 120 volts (1500e(130/120)).

"If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus)
"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat."
— Confucius
"Man makes plans . . . and God laughs."
— Michael Chabon
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain"

If you hadn't of told us, I'd never of figured out that Bob's Speed Racers was responsible for all that corporatist stuff. Next time I deep six an economy, I'll remember to pass the blame on to some arcade dealer in Florida.

"Senator, while a reasonable person might think the failure of our 15 trillion dollar company and complete collapse of the world economy was due to criminal incompetence, coke and hookers, and a 0.3% reserve, I must place blame wholly where it is deserved. Bob's Speed Racers did it."

If, however, he cannot afford two LEDs or two halogens, he is to bring as an offering for his sin ten AAA cells for a sin offering. He must not polish the contacts, because it is a sin offering. He is to bring it to the Senior Electrical Engineer, who shall take a couple of the cells as a memorial portion and insert them in the altar circuit with the offerings made to the Lord by short-circuit. It is a sin offering.

The warranty covers material defects and workmanship. It generally lasts as long as the weakest part needed to keep the engine running will last within the normal use cycle that wouldn't void the warranty.

In the case of your engine dieing at 103000 miles, it would be a mechanical fault from wear and tear or perhaps some other failure due explicitly to the normal operation of the engine. If the car company programmed a the car's computer to stop running after 103000 miles, then it would be a malic

You're confusing someone maliciously causing an equipment failure to churn profits for himself with an actuarially-derived lifetime for your car. Yes, most cars make it past 100,000 miles, and half start to fail at 150,000, therefore giving a warranty to 100,000 miles is less risky than giving one to 150,000 miles. It's just math.

Mostly because any good software engineer could put a hard-to-find bug in the code. Thank goodness it takes a good social engineer to make money off it - and the two skills don't often overlap in real life (as much as software engineers seem to think they do).

The other reason programmers will never rule the world - eventually the whack-a-person machines will require Marvin to come fix them.

Mostly because any good software engineer could put a hard-to-find bug in the code. Thank goodness it takes a good social engineer to make money off it - and the two skills don't often overlap in real life (as much as software engineers seem to think they do).

The other reason programmers will never rule the world - eventually the whack-a-person machines will require Marvin to come fix them.

Programmers will never rule the world, because by then they have been promoted to software engineers, managers, etc. It's the same with toddlers.

hmm... I think software engineers were socially engineered into believing the marketing hype that they were actually engineers and not just mere mortal programmers or computer scientists. Where are the mathematical engineers? The slashdot comment engineers? My thin point is the word 'engineer' is losing it's meaning, much to the heartbreak of civil, mechanical, industrial, electrical and computer engineers.

The answer is all Engineers are "Mathematical Engineers" and all Engineers are "Science Engineers". There is nothing beyond engineering other than the application of those two things to solve real world techinical problems. If you think building bridges is more prestigious then designing airplanes or designing the software and algorithms to make missiles hit other missiles that's fine and dandy but you don't get to redefine engineering into "only the specific disciplines states bother to license". The fa

419 scams depend on finding someone greedy; one original form was to find a house who's owner had left on holiday, bribe the watchman for the keys, and then sell it to another person on the basis of "OK, we've had a few good parties here, you know I'm a great guy, but suddenly I have to leave the country and need $10,000 real quick", at which the mark realizes this is a great opportunity (the house is easily worth ten times that), and offers to buy it.

Houses in Lagos, Nigeria (when I worked there) sometimes had "419! Not for Sale!" painted on their walls, when their owners were away.

However, social engineering depends on decent peoples' trust; head hunted calling the receptionist and asking, "who's your best Java developer?", or emailing the tech support from a hacked account so you look like the boss, and asking, "hey, give me ssh access and a new password, ok?"

What this guy did was more like simple robbery, getting money by force.

Each game, after turning on and off a certain number of times, sometimes 50, sometimes 500, would fail. Wimberly would be paid to fix it, and police reports say, he would insert a new virus with a new countdown.

Eh, "whac-a-mole" and "code reviews" are probably stretching the realm of probability. I'm pretty sure the "programming staff" required to implement "mole pops up, detect if whacked" could be done by a single programmer in this mostly mechanical-game-oriented company, making useful code reviews a bit tough. Sounds like it really was a mom-and-pop company, and they just put way too much trust in a real douche bag of an employee...

He was worried about being laid off as a programmer, so they obviously had more than one programmer. Once you start noticing that the machines are breaking down twice as often as normal, and no physical parts are needed to fix them, its gets obvious that it is a software issue. Assuming they pay attention to the breakage rate, which any normal company would. Might have been how they figured it out.

I've seen "computer administrators" that work out for small companies do very similar things. It is typical

The only way for companies that make thinks like whac a mole to make money is to contract hire the programmer, probably the lowest bidder for the job. They would not have a programmer on staff. They would then hire back the programmer when they needed someone to diagnose the issue. Hence the situation where they had to hire him back to figure out what was wrong with the machines. There is no point to having a single full time programmer let alone a team tha

Presumably whack-a-mole is too big to fail. This guy will be a good scapegoat, but it won't solve the problems inherent in an economy that depends so much on whack-a-mole.

Yeah. Through incompetence or malice, people can leave a national debt that will take generations to deal with, and economic ruin, yet I'd be surprised if any of them end-up doing more than five years. They'll get out even earlier if they're fortunate enough to be struck with a unique form of alzheimer's that mysteriously vanishes shortly after they're released from prison on medical grounds - as experienced by the Earnest Saunders.

In answer to your question, if bankers, property developers and financial regulators came together in a mixture of fraud and reckless hubris, leaving the economy of my laptop or car in tatters, I'd be quite annoyed. Thankfully though my laptop doesn't use a fiat currency - thus rendering it immune to the machinations of international financiers and whack-a-mole.

Don't be naive. Everything is about whack-a-mole. This guy just tried to break the hold that whack-a-mole has on us, and for his trouble he'll spend

...You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry. -- Rolling Stones

The key is "up to" 15 years. Unless it has a mandatory minimum sentence, the judge has a lot of leeway in what is handed down. A lot of other crimes have pretty broad sentencing guidelines as well.

In this case, Whac-A-Mole isn't that big of a deal. If an arcade game fails, it's rare someone gets hurt. He'll get off lightly.

If he'd done this with something more mission critical (and it somehow made it past QC) that might warrant more.

Imagine if he'd put a logic bomb in a system controlling a radiation therapy machine for cancer. Even if it hadn't hurt anyone, the potential for harm would be much greater, and the judge would take that into account in setting the sentence.

Did he even commit this crime [justia.com]? Wasn't he authorized to be in that system altering code? What are the police doing involved? Shouldn't this just be a civil suit in which the company sues him for damages?

" 'The real key is they need a piece of equipment that works from the Fourth of July, on the busiest day of the year, and it's consistent and they can depend on it,' Mike Lane, Bob's Space Racers."

Are media outlets contracting journalism work to illiterate morons now, or has it always been that way and I'm just now noticing it?

I you hadn't of discovered this I am pretty sure that on some point of the future, probably on the busiest day of the year, you'd have the mormons knocking at your door and would of discovered this your self. This thus has always be the way. The journalism writers are correct in there.

> "If they hadn't of discovered that they had the virus installed
> in the equipment, they wouldn't have known why their
> machines were failing," said Cpt. Steve Aldrich, Holly Hill
> Police Department.

Holly Hill's finest at work. You heard it here folks, if they hadn't of figured it out, they wouldn't have known!

... Actually, the article states that if he hadn't mentioned it, they wouldn't have been looking at a software "feature" at all.

Someday I will be ask my opinion on something, and I'll say "They would've blah blah blah", and I'll be quoted in print as "They would of blah blah blah" and then there will be another article about me killing the reporter.

No, but insisting on the strict applications or the rules of writing, even across cultural boundaries, when the parent clearly was poking fun of (or should it be have) the entire situation is a pretty good sign of it.

From his mugshot, he looks like a sad character. I kinda feel bad for what he's about to go through on his little vacation to the justice system. There are certainly worse things a person could do.

For Slashdot points, I will now note that what this guy planted was a logic bomb, not a virus.

I will mention that logic bomb is stated in the summary. In the article too, but also in the summary. In order to be commenting here, unless you wildly click on random stories and type random things... you'd have to have read logic bomb.
For slashdot points, I will tell people to RTF... summary... before commenting.

What are you talking about? The true Slashdot hardcore do not even read the TITLES, much less the summaries. The articles? Those don't actually exist. Ever tried clicking on one? Don't waste your time, there's never anything at the other end of that link.

What are you talking about? The true Slashdot hardcore do not even read the TITLES, much less the summaries. The articles? Those don't actually exist. Ever tried clicking on one? Don't waste your time, there's never anything at the other end of that link.

That's insane, no rational human being can justify stealing music from content creators. If you want to listen, buy the media - period.

I know the laser printer designed failure is true the fuser was designed so after a certain amount of use it would stay on overheat and kill the printer. A friend had a printer with this feature and there was a reset on the printer to stop this happening , he got to find out from a service engineer. Unfortunately I can't remember which printer it was on.

must have been in the mid 90's when he told me about it. Funny thing is I can't find anything about it on google or even snopes. Anyone find any lin

What about inkjets that count pages and then don't let you print using your half-full cartridge. HP would at least let you change it and put it back in. Epson remembered and didn't even let you do that. Can we send Epson to jail for 15 years?

I've known "consultants" for small businesses that would replace failed components with other cheap components. That way he'd have a somewhat steady source of income. "That file server lost connectivity...probably that dlink nic I installed six months ago."

Our story: "Programmer who visits sites to fix problems introduced the problems himself to make sure he stayed in business!"
The lusers' fear: "Programmers who make anti-virus software introduced viruses into the wild to make sure they stay in business!"

mark-t was not offtopic. If I had not already commented in another thread on this article, I would mod him back up, myself.

To summarize my train of thought - the guy was deliberately installing a virus so that he would have to be contacted to fix the problem, thereby making money off of it.... which is, near as I can see, not all that dissimilar from the notion that virus companies deliberately manufacture viruses so that they can make money by selling virus scanners.

This semi-answers my questions. This and another article mention that this guy wrote the logic bomb only in 2008, presumably for much more modern incarnations of the hardware (modern microcontrollers almost always have onboard NVRAM of some kind, making this kind of trick easy to pull off with a field-deployed firmware 'upgrade'). For Whac-A-Mole,